The Ghosts of Strangers

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  As she grew toward thirteen, Elexa acted like the other children in the village for the most part, snaring the ghosts of small animals for the dragons, who couldn't catch them on their own and drew some kind of nourishment from them. She gave her little game ghosts to her brother, who was dragon-bonded, or to her best friend Tira's older sister, Miri, whose dragon had a brood of four to provide for.

  #

  In her twelfth spring, Elexa packed a pouch for a day on the mountain: oat cakes spread with nut butter, a stoppered gourd full of water, and three small dried apples from last fall's harvest. She and Tira would spend all day on the banks of Little River, looking for gems in the outwash from yesterday's storm. Maybe she didn't need to pack water. Sometimes the water at the river's edge stayed cloudy for days after a storm, though. She didn't like to drink water she couldn't see through.

  She glanced across the cottage at her father, who was packing his own lunch; it was his turn to guard the herd of sheep and goats the village kept for the dragons. When she was sure his head was turned, she stole a handful of beet sugar, funneled it from her fingers into the little gourd she carried for spices.

  Her brother Kindal came from behind the curtain that hid the sleeping pallets. His dark brows lowered. He had seen. Would he tell? Sugar was expensive; Father had bought this for festival cakes, but the spring festival wasn't until next week, and Elexa had a sweet tooth now.

  "You owe me a ghost," Kindal muttered as he passed her.

  She sighed.

  Kindal took his quiver of arrows and his bow from their hooks on the wall.

  "Good hunting," said their father.

  "Good herding," Kindal replied. He tied a game pouch to his belt and ducked outside.

  Elexa took an empty loot pouch and hooked it to her belt, along with her old knife. She slung the lunch pouch across her chest and took her dowsing/digging stick from its place on the wall. "I'm off," she said.

  "Good hunting to you, too," said her father.

  "Thanks." If she found enough gems, she'd be able to buy a mountain of sugar, and that new red-handled knife Mats the peddler had shown her on his last trip through the village. Father wanted a new scythe, though; that came first. He had sharpened the blade of his old one thin. "Back by suppertime."

  Tira waited by the path that led to the dragon terraces. She looked longingly up the mountain toward the nesting sites. The girls were a year away from bonding with dragons. Tira's mother told them they should enjoy their freedom; once they had bonded, they would spend most of their days hunting small game and ghosts to keep the dragon mothers and babies fed, in addition to their village work. A dragon bond lasted a lifetime; but the hard-working part of it, where human children provided food for brooding mothers and nestlings, lasted seven years, the length of dragon childhood. Tira's mother, who told Elexa things her father wouldn't, said it was a wonderful and a terrible time. The dragon bond was a treasure and a joy, but the work was difficult. If you didn't catch enough gophers, pheasants, fish, rabbits, squirrels, and ghosts, the dragon babies' hunger groaned in your own belly as loudly as it did in theirs.

  Kindal's dragon mother had two nestlings; he didn't get as run down and ragged as Tira's sister Miri, with four to care for. Miri hunted from dawn to twilight, and set snares and fishtraps at night.

  "Bond to a mother with fewer eggs," Tira's mother advised Tira and Elexa.

  Elexa had asked her father about this. His dragon mother's nestlings had fledged and flown away, though they returned for the dragon gather at midwinter. At that time, there was a flurry of unbonded dragons dropping to the village center ground, greeting those who had helped raise them.

  Elexa's father said, "Visit the mothers before Bond Night; get to know the ones who want to bond. You won't be able to tell how many eggs they have until after you bond; no dragon lets an unbonded youngster into a cave. You'll know which dragon to bond with on the night of the bond. She will choose you; you don't choose her." He still took the occasional rabbit up the mountain for his dragon mother; sometimes she brought him a deer she had hunted deeper in the mountains where there were no people. Sometimes, now that her children were grown, she spent winters on the southern beaches, but she always came back to the terrace in the spring to help with the year's crop of fledglings.

  "When I bond, maybe my dragon mother will take me flying," Tira said as she stared up the path to First Terrace.

  "Most of them won't, though. Dragons aren't made to carry humans," said Elexa.

  "Kindal's Maia does." Kindal's dragon mother took him scouting in early spring so he could report back to the village whether the passes were choked with snow or open, whether there were peddlers or raiders on the way. Maia's fledglings, Peep and Seek, were strong and adventurous and unusually independent. They had second-bonded to another dragon mother, so Maia wasn't afraid to leave them with their aunt and take Kindal flying.

  Tira went up to the dragon terraces sometimes to visit the nests. She talked to her sister Miri's dragon, but she couldn't understand the dragon's answers. She didn't have Elexa's gift for dragonspeech, one of the subjects they studied in the gatherhouse in the evening.

  Since the night she met her mother's dragon, Elexa had been up the mountain four times, ferrying ghosts. None of the other dragons she had met were as scary as the first, though she met them all while they were grieving.

  Without formal introductions, humans weren't supposed to speak to dragons, though Elexa had. Some dragons could only speak to their bondlings, while others knew human tongues and could speak to anyone. The dragons didn't have leaders, but sometimes they let one of the more skilled linguists speak for a group of them.

  Elexa helped her brother hunt food for his dragon mother. He taught her arrow, knife, stalking, and trapping skills, and she gave him the game she caught. He hadn't introduced her to his dragon yet.

  Elexa took Tira's wrist and pulled her from the dragon path to the river path. Tira watched over her shoulder until the dragon path was out of sight.

  Trees were shedding their winter gloom, pushing baby leaves out at the ends of branches, though their spring shadows still looked cold against the damp ground. As the path wound through a clearing, Elexa saw the gray of an animal ghost. She darted forward and snapped a mental net around it. The ghost had the thin panic of a mouse, tiny, thumping with a heartbeat it no longer had. Not much of a ghost, but Kindal wouldn't know the difference, and now he'd keep quiet about the sugar she'd stolen. Most people had no idea what kinds of ghosts they caught.

  "Ghost?" Tira asked.

  "Just a little one."

  "I didn't even see it. You're so fast!"

  Elexa strengthened the mesh of her mental net and imagined hooking it to her belt, felt a brush at her hip, a prickle on her skin. The mouse's panic settled into rest as it felt the embrace of the net. Its last living sight had been the shadow of the hawk that caught it; its ghost had squirted out as its body went down the hawk's gullet. If Elexa hadn't caught it, it would have probably let go of the Earth sometime soon and drifted wherever mouse souls went. You had to catch a ghost when it was fresh or you couldn't catch them at all.

  "Come on." She headed toward the river again, and Tira trailed her.

  Other children had come ahead of them and were scattered along the river banks already, searching for gems, one of the village's chief trade goods. The mountain was rich in gems and let loose of them after storms, when Little River grew bold and carried topsoil down to the valley, uncovering hidden things.

  The dragons kept strangers away from the gems.

  Elexa started upstream. "Get out of here," screamed Sanric, her least favorite boy. "This bank and everything on it is mine!" His hands fisted at his sides, and his face was set in what she thought might be a permanent glower, eyebrows down, eyes narrowed, mouth frowning, forehead knotted under his bush of dark hair. Though he was twelve, his shoulders were already more muscular than Kindal's.

  "Oh?" Elexa stooped and lifted an apricot-sized
and -colored gem from the mud. She scrubbed it against her tunic, brushing off mud, then held it up where the sun caught in its yellow-orange glow. "I think not."

  "Hey!" Sanric yelled. He ran at her and tried to snatch the jewel from her hand. She closed her fist around it and thumped his chest, knocking him back.

  "You don't own the runoff!" she cried, and dashed past him upstream. Tira had ducked into the trees; she rejoined Elexa after they had gotten past a section of bank bigger than Sanric could search in two days. Even though people couldn't lay claim to what the river gave them until they held it in their hands, they tried to respect each other's hunting grounds. Sanric scuffed Elexa's temper every time they met, though.

  She tucked the gem into her loot pouch. Served him right, ignoring such a find right near where he was searching.

  Elexa could walk across picked-over ground and find gems everyone else had missed. There was a scent to them, a flavor, something she could sense with the same senses she used to capture ghosts.

  The others didn't talk with the ghosts they captured. Tira could catch ghosts, though she sometimes missed obvious ones. She mostly caught small game ghosts, rabbits and mice and sparrows; she rarely noticed dogs or horses, cows or sheep, cats or chickens, not until Elexa had netted them, and she never saw human ghosts, even the ones Elexa caught.

  No one but Elexa caught human ghosts.

  Tira and Elexa hiked up the river far past Sanric's hunting grounds, almost to the falls at the edge of First Terrace. Tira tugged Elexa's hand. "Look at Gold Beach," she shouted over the sound of the falls.

  Something had happened in this last storm; the banks of the river had shifted. The beach on the near side of the river was eaten away, and a new shelf edged the river on the far side. Already Elexa sensed a litter of gems under the surface of the new beach.

  How were they going to get across? The water was freezing this far up the mountain, and wild enough to cover stones that were good for stepping on.

  Elexa trudged up to where the waterfall thundered into a deep pool at the base of the terrace. She usually didn't hunt this far up the river, but she'd heard a rumor that a person could walk across behind the waterfall. Tira followed her over the stacks of debris the river had dropped along the edge, a few feet above the waterline now: rocks, twisted and broken trees, some of them the stunted, deformed pines from the upper reaches of the mountain that grew into strange shapes in the embrace of high winds. A tangle of bones littered the river's edges, white against the different browns of wood and earth. A legacy of dragon meals; some were the bones of goats, some of sheep, some of wild animals.

  Elexa approached the pounding water shooting down from the cliff. The water was noise, vibration, wind, a battering of sound that had her covering her ears with her hands. Mist rose from where the fall tumbled into the pool, dampening Elexa's face, tunic, and trousers. The water flavored the air with the taste of cold metal. Elexa glanced back at Tira, saw Tira's mouth was open. Probably Tira was shouting something, but the thunder of the falls drowned it out. Elexa waved a hand, then edged to the side of the falls to see if there really was a way behind it.

  Dim light shone through the water, revealing a cave behind the falls. Elexa slipped into it. It was cold and dark and shallow — she didn't sense much space going back into darkness. Rippled light came through the water. She couldn't see clearly out through the wall of falling water, but she saw hazy details, the banks to either side, the pool just below her, the tangle of trees and sky above. She slipped across and emerged on the far side of the river.

  Tira waved. Elexa gestured toward the falls and turned to explore the new beach. She took two steps before she dropped to her knees on the wet mud, poked her stick toward the strongest gem feeling she'd had in ages. In a moment she unearthed a dark, rough stone the size of her palm. It was denser than most of the gems she found. She held it up to the sun and saw dark blue-violet light through it. Rare color. It felt strong and unflawed in her hand, but she wouldn't know until a rough polish or cutting. She had practiced fractioning cheap gems, clear quartz and flawed garnets. This one she wouldn't cut. Laisal was the best one in the village for gems. He had acquired jewel-working tools and knowledge from various peddlers over the years. She'd share the find with him.

  She tucked it into her loot pouch and crawled to the next warm spot she sensed, plunged her stick into the ground. She dug furiously, taken over by gem fever. She hardly noticed Tira roaming across the beach, poking the ground with her own digging stick. Tira concentrated on the sand at water's edge. Where she saw promising stones, she cut a little channel from the water and led it over to wash out her finds.

  When Elexa glanced up some time later, she saw that Tira's loot pouch bulged. Elexa looked over her shoulder, saw the series of holes she'd left in the mud. Her loot pouch was so full she had no place to put the small yellow gem she had just found. She checked the sun: directly overhead.

  "Lunch?" she called to Tira, whose dark hair had come out of its tie and lay in muddy tangles around her head. Once Elexa ate, she could use her lunch pouch for more loot. It was the most fruitful morning she remembered.

  "I thought you'd never stop," Tira said.

  Elexa stood, her knees creaking. She and Tira went to the grassy verge of the old riverbank above the new beach and sat on soft new plants.

  Tira spread the leather skirt of her tunic over her muddy trousers and poured the morning's gems into her lap. Most were rough, rounded, their translucence almost hidden, but two had clean surfaces where they had hit against things in their tumble down the mountain and broken open. One was muddy green, the other a pinkish red much paler than most of the dark garnets they usually gathered.

  Elexa touched a rough dark stone the size of a radish. "That one," she said.

  Tira held it up to the sun, squinted through it. "This is my best? What color will it be? It looks brown."

  "It will be beer-colored, but very clear."

  "Show yours."

  Elexa spilled her gems into her lap. Two of the smaller ones skipped out into the grass.

  "Lexa!" Tira reached out a hand toward Elexa's hoard, stopped before she touched a single one. "So many!"

  "I'm lucky today."

  "Lucky," Tira said, and snorted.

  Elexa smiled down at her collection. Enough good gems here to keep her and Kindal and Father in scythes, knives, and sugar for more than a year, even after the village tax. She plucked the big blue-purple one up and handed it to Tira.

  "Is it black?" Tira faced the sun and turned the stone this way and that. "Oh! I've never seen this color before!"

  "I want Laisal to cut it."

  "But he'll take half of whatever you sell it for."

  "I don't care. I want to see it before I sell it."

  Tira handed the stone back. They put their gems away and ate their lunches. Elexa had just offered Tira her last apple when they heard a strange faint sound, high and far, above the sleepy murmurs of afternoon birdsong and the chuckle of the river.

  It was a cry, a kheer like a hawk, growing louder.

  Elexa got to her feet, searched the sky between treetops. As the sound grew, its feel shifted. She heard terror. She heard words.

  "No! No! Please!" screamed the voice, the words accented and strange. "No!"

  Through the gap in the trees, Elexa saw the widespread wings of a strange dragon, not too far above the ground. Its underwing patterns were yellow splayed like leaves against a background of green. Its outstretched neck and head were shadowed bronze, and its tail went from red to black. Its mid-legs clutched a struggling human to its belly. "Please!" cried the human. "Let me go!"

  The dragon's shadow eclipsed the sun, casting it into silhouette just as one of its hind legs reached forward. Elexa heard a crack. The screaming stopped.

  Sour bile rose in Elexa's throat, and her heart sped. She had never seen a person die by violence before, though her ghosts had told her stories. Her heart hurt.

  Something dropp
ed to the ground, and then the dragon was gone, up toward the higher terraces.

  "Not one of ours," whispered Tira. Her face was still and blank. The wing patterns weren't familiar to Elexa either. A wild dragon. A male? Out of season, and hunting humans here?

  Elexa knew dragons killed people. But surely that was other dragons, far away.

  They should have a little time while the dragon dealt with its kill before it came hunting again, unless it was a nesting female, stocking up a cave for the time it would spend sitting its eggs. Then it would kill as many animals as quickly as it could.

  Tira ran across the beach to the fallen thing, stooped to pick it up, and ran back. She dropped to her knees beside Elexa. Her hand opened. A man's gold armband fell from it.

  The sign chased across the metal plates wasn't familiar, but Elexa turned away and lost her lunch. She couldn't stop retching.

  Tira's arm was around her when finally the heaving stopped. Elexa's stomach was sore, and her throat burned. She glanced toward the sky, afraid, now, as she never had been before, of dragon shadows against the sun.

  "We have to get home," Tira said. "We have to raise the alarm." She tucked the armband in her loot pouch and helped Elexa to her feet.

  On their way up the mountain, Elexa had been the one with the swiftest feet, always tugging Tira onward. On the way home, Elexa kept stumbling. Tira's arm kept her steady; Tira's urging kept her going. When they passed Sanric, and he called out a taunt about them quitting early, Elexa barely heard him.

  "Are you blind as well as stupid?" Tira yelled. "Didn't you see that wild one, with its human prey?"

  Voices called up and down the river at that. All the children collected their things and followed Tira and Elexa off the mountainside. "Hide in the cave," Tira told the others. "Elexa and I will warn the others."